Friday, March 01, 2024

What I Bought 2/24/2024 - Part 1

Welcome to March, hurrah, hurrah. See what that brings us. Starting things off with the first two issues of a mini-series.

Deer Editor #1 and 2, by Ryan Lindsay (writer), Sami Kivela (artist), Lauren Affe (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - On these mean streets, you need the instincts to run directly into the side of a car that would rather avoid you.

Bucky's the editor of a newspaper. He's also a deer, or a man with the head of a deer. Not totally sure which. Kivela gives him hooves, but the digits are able to move and operate like fingers. Bucky gets a call from a coroner about a man who was acting strangely before he was hit by a car. That leads to a bar, which leads to a dead press secretary for the mayor.

As these things usually do, Bucky soon finds himself encountering various lantern-jawed, dimwitted goons with a taste for punching until they get keys that open lockers at bus stations. Bucky thinks it's a simple land grab, real estate scheme. Buy them up, kill the ones who hold out, sell the land for quick bucks. A private equity twist on the Wild West classic.

It turns out to be something much stranger. The mayor and a bunch of his friends are vampires, which we actually learn via Bucky's sub-editor, who Lindsay chooses to follow for the first half of the second issue, as Bucky is missing for three months. The second half of the issue covers what he's been up to (getting tortured), before the mayor makes the standard "work for us," spiel.

That leads to a nice little fight scene, which I thought maybe Affe would take as an opportunity to shift away from the blue-and-white color scheme, but no. You could make a good argument it didn't really change anything. The mayor's still in charge, Bucky's still an opposing force, the end result is yet to be seen.

The mayor said in the first issue, knowledge isn't power, power is power. Which is the deep insight one expects of a public official. Bucky noted the mayor is a creep that rules with threats and intimidation (and we've certainly seen that's true), but he makes the trains run on time, so the populace doesn't care. Guess we'll see if that holds through to the end.

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